Cotswold-stone cottages run down to a walled estate, and behind the wall the ground drops away into 270 acres of deer park. That is most of Dyrham. The village lost its pubs, its school, its shop and its post offices, the parish putting it down to people simply getting further, faster. What remains is stone, a church, and the great house it grew up beside.
For food and a drink you leave the village, though not by much. The Bull sits just over a mile away at Hinton, a 17th-century pub with open fires, dining rooms and a terrace and garden that get the sun. The kitchen changes with the season: pan-roasted sea bass with watercress risotto, Guinness-glazed beef short rib, courgette and cherry-tomato gnocchi, cider-battered fish and chips, a fish pie under cheesy mash and king prawns, sticky toffee pudding to finish. Well-behaved dogs are welcome; mention them when you book.
The Crown is at Tolldown on the A46, with nine rooms, wooden floors and large open fireplaces. It leans on named suppliers, Walter Rose the butcher, Kingfisher of Brixham for fish, Hobbs House Bakery for bread, and does a Sunday roast and fish and chips in Butcombe Gold batter. There is a sun-trap garden, and it welcomes dogs too.
The estate is the main attraction. The house tea-room serves light lunches, cakes, scones and cream teas, with a scone of the month that changes through the year, and the Old Lodge café has indoor and outdoor seating with a play area, ice-cream kiosk, toilets and picnic tables beside it. The shop sells plants, local maps and guides, chutneys and curds, biscuits, shortbread, ales and fruit liqueurs, and there is a second-hand bookshop in the basement of the house.
One thing to settle before you arrive with a dog: only assistance dogs are allowed into the park, which keeps a herd of fallow deer to protect.
The walking is the other draw. The Prospect Walk is three miles of rolling parkland, graded easy but steep, uneven and often muddy, climbing to views over the Cotswold hills and the Bristol Channel; on a clear day the Welsh Black Mountains show on the far side, and the route finishes facing the Baroque east front of the house. The Terraces walk is a shorter circuit of two and a half miles through open parkland and wooded terraces, taking in the West Garden, while the family-length Journey of Discovery covers two miles with clues to read along the way. The Cotswold Way runs north to south through the parish and links Dyrham Park with Bath, and a gentler five-mile parish circuit sets off from the village hall shared by Dyrham and Hinton.
The Church of St Peter stands in the same stone group as the house and stables, an ensemble Verey and Brooks called "the perfect English setting". It is Grade I, mid-13th-century in origin, with a tower and porch added in the early 1400s. Inside there is a late-Norman font, a Jacobean pulpit and sounding board, a 16th-century Flemish altar triptych, medieval encaustic tiles and nine hatchments; brasses mark Sir Maurice Russell, who died in 1416, and his wife Isobel, and old glass carries a white rose of York.
Dyrham has been settled a long time. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records a West Saxon victory over the Britons here in 577, though the traditional battle site up on Hinton Hill remains only supposed. By 1086 the Domesday surveyors counted thirty-four households, three mills and six acres of meadow, and valued the manor at £8 a year, down from £12 two decades earlier. The house came much later. Sir William Denys took a licence from Henry VIII in 1511 to empark five hundred acres for deer, and William Blathwayt began new gardens at the house in 1691 and added the west front the year after.
There is no direct bus. The nearest stations are Yate, seven miles off, Bath Spa at eight and Bristol Parkway at twelve, all around 15 to 20 minutes by taxi from the gates, and the estate sits on the A46 two miles south of the M4 at junction 18; the main entrance is fast, which cyclists should note.
The deer have the run of the slope below the cottages, under old lime pollards that line Church Walk.
